The session recording will be archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

This session was streamed but not recorded

Curated Track: Black Geographies Specialty Group Curated Track

Description:

“It is worth repeating here some of my signposts: the terrible discursive burden, the brutal unforgetting, the fantastic and impossible, the corporeal predicaments, the profoundly disturbing door of no return – the nowhere of black life. What I want to propose is that the nowhere of black life is one of many useful analytics through which to orient our political vision of black geographies.”
From “Worn Out” by Katherine McKittrick

The current moment and events of the recent past call for increasing attention to the geographical dimensions of public memory and commemoration, to reconsider the way the “discourse of the past is constructed socially and expressed materially” and spatially (Foote and Azaryahu 2007). By doing so, geographers counteract efforts to sanitize the past and disrupt hegemonic histories and civic myths, which “must continually adapt to changing social and political conditions” (Tillet 2012, 6). Consequently deeper engagements with the visions of Blackness that manifest cultural and historical sites, what Clyde Woods (1998/2017) calls “the sacred,” is necessary. Individuals, communities, and places that have been historically and structurally made peripheral or intentionally erased have witnessed their participation in and augmentation of the hegemonic narrative of public memory obstructed, thereby hindering the ability to lay bare the harsh realities conveniently hidden by the dominant narrative (Tillet 2012, Bledsoe and Wright 2019). Under-acknowledged and under-commemorated, these omitted narratives and sites are essential for a greater understanding and reckoning with the past.

In this session, we invite a conversation centering the complications and possibilities that arise in preserving and interpreting Black spaces of historic and cultural significance that have been systematically marginalized in their representation or have gone unpreserved in the physical landscape (Roberts 2019). In addition, we welcome papers that attend to how the creation of permanent exhibits and structures, which function to represent impermanent spatial and social practices, can complicate prevailing memory narratives and instead, who we can “orient our political vision” to more liberatory processes of engaging and interpreting sites of memory.

Non-Presenting Participants